[4.11] Scaling Laws and the Temperature and Mass Functions of Galaxy Clusters

Large, flux-limited samples of galaxy clusters are becoming
available from searches based on ROSAT PSPC data either from
the ROSAT All Sky Survey, e.g. the BCS (Ebeling et al. 1998)
and RASS1 (de Grandi et al. 1998), or from serendipitous
detections in pointed PSPC observations, e.g. WARPS (Scharf
et al. 1997) and RDCS (Rosati et al. 1998). These samples
have previously been used to determine the cluster x-ray
luminosity function (XLF). We present preliminary results a
method to determine the local temperature and mass functions
using such samples by applying scaling laws between x-ray
luminosity, temperature, and mass. Applying the
luminosity-temperature relation, we derive the temperature
function of clusters from ~1-10 keV. We then derive the
mass function between few 1013 - 1015h-1
M\odot using a mass-temperature relation and constrain
the total mass density in groups and clusters.

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